On this, the 58th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death, I finished reading The World We Live In.

My great-grandmother, who had owned the book for over thirty years, gifted me the large, heavy, rust-colored book on this day in 1991. She was visiting from her home on Long Island, and she had gifts for her great-grandchildren, all twelve of them.

I still remember the rush of all the kids – of which I was oldest – and adults. Her visits to Minnesota always brought my mom’s entire family together at my grandparents. And I can still remember her curly white hair and her scent when we hugged – a slight mothball aroma infused with a strong tea. “Here you go, dear,” she said, handing me the big book. She always called me dear, though, come to think of it, she called everyone dear. She had an eastern accent – the kind my mom, and even I – had when I was little. So the dear was more like deaaa. Like most of my New Yorker family, she tended to erase Rs that were supposed to be spoken, and then insert them into words that didn’t otherwise have them.

Her mannerisms and accent actually reminded my sister and me of someone we saw regularly on TV. Diane and I often compared our family members to famous people, usually on account of looks, but sometimes we ascribed a doppelgänger based on mannerisms, too. One uncle reminded us of Brian Wilson. Steven Tyler inexplicably looked like one of our aunts. But our great-grandma, whom we called Grandma Kopp (since that was her last name, after all), embodied Jean Stapleton.

“I wrote your name in it,” she added, as I kissed and thanked her. I opened the front cover and, true to her word, she had written “To James D. Zimmerman • Love Grand Ma • 2/3/91.”

For years, the odd-sized book languished on my shelf. Once the computer age was in full swing, I recruited it as a laptop desk. At the approaching of the twentieth anniversary since I was granted possession of it, I contemplated finally reading it cover to cover. Its very size posed a challenge; I couldn’t lug it work to read during break, and I couldn’t leave it sitting on the toilet tank for that other time I devote to reading. As the date approached and I realized I was too busy with a six-month old child and a new college course beginning that very day, I satisfied myself with simply reading the introduction.

Over the next five years, I read about five percent of the book. Then I hit upon the idea of finishing it on the 25th anniversary, but that eclipsed, too.

During my holiday break in December, I pulled it off its shelf – a narrow shelf on which it sits horizontally with two other unwieldy tomes – and committed myself to at last reaching the back cover by the marginally remarkable 26th anniversary since Grandma Kopp put pen to front free endpaper.

Done.

February is a better month than January. Mostly because it’s around ten percent shorter.

At least February is honest with us. January sneaks in with duplicitous joviality – kicking off with a party and then spending the first day as a holiday. The segue is appreciated, I suppose, but it also leaves me off kilter, like I wake up on the second or third with a hangover wondering where the year and my time off went.

But February starts right in. This year, it begins mid-week. I held off February as long as I could, setting my alarm for an hour later than usual, but that extra sleep was paid for with a worse commute. Heavy traffic. Still dark. Still cold. Still dead – the trees remind me of the circulatory brachiating they put up on the big screens at work to demonstrate the tortuous path of our catheters.

At least our Christmas tree still looks nice. As of two weeks ago, I stripped it of its ornamentation and removed it from the house. But it now decorates our deck, just outside the kitchen windows. Birds sit in it and it rests for now until its next step on its year long journey going from living tree to becoming a single ornament on next year’s tree.

The other thing February brings is spring semester at the university. It doesn’t feel like spring, but that’s what they call the semester, regardless of the windchill. For six out of the last seven Februarys, I started a class at Hamline University. The only spring semester I missed was in 2014, and that was because Jennifer was due to give birth during finals week. It’s already crappy enough that Owen’s birthday coincides with finals week, I didn’t want to complicate things by being in class at the same time kid number three came aboard and, anyway, I made up for missing that spring semester by taking a summer course. I start a class at Hamline in five days. An email from the school invited me to a reception next Thursday toasting 100 days until graduation. Like usual, I probably won’t attend the celebration, but I’ll silently celebrate the milestone. It’s been a long time in coming.

As part of my efforts to be viewed as a non-shitty parent, I walk with Owen to his jiu jitsu class on Monday evenings. It’s only three blocks from the Zimmerman Compound and, when he first enrolled, he walked there himself. But that was September, and our slice of the planet hadn’t turned away from the sun by 6:00PM. But in January, it’s already dark. It’s dark all the time. January is the worst month.

In the brief time it took us to cover the distance, Owen said, “Know a funny thing? I can remember the first day of fourth grade, but not fifth grade or sixth grade! Isn’t that weird?”

Hm. I considered this for a moment. It was indeed weird. Owen’s fourth grade was neither the first nor the last year at his school. It wasn’t his first woman teacher (it was his fifth one in a row), nor was it his most recent school year.

“Really?” I said, incredulous. “You sure you don’t remember the first day of sixth grade? That was just a few months ago.”

“I can’t think of it,” he said, noticing that the memory was somewhere in his brain, like a lost book shoved behind other books on a shelf, but that he simply couldn’t access it.

“What was so special about fourth grade? What happened on that first day?”

“You know. The teacher just said hi and talked and stuff.”

“Yeah…”

“And then she had us all sit in a circle on the floor,” he explained, and then noted that this was the teacher’s method of introducing everyone to everyone else.

Of course, Owen had sat in a circle lots of times before, most notably in preschool and kindergarten. But by fourth grade, such circular kumbaya-ing seemed to juvenile for Owen and the other nine-year-olds, so the action of doing something unexpected created a solid pattern in Owen’s neurons that he can still easily recall over two years later.

He asked if I could recall any first days of school. My mind scrambled to recall which school I attended for which grade. I quickly thought about seventh, my first year of junior high, and twelfth, the most recent year of public school I had in my mind. where did those memories go? Why couldn’t I access them? What happened in the interim that caused thirteen first days to merge with the hundred other regular school days from each year. Yes, I could picture my science teacher from seventh grade, who gave me a pencil sharpener I still had mounted on my wall, I could remember that paunchy, bearded biologist from eleventh grade that uncomfortably asserted evolution was true, and I could recall the beautiful student teacher from second grade, who smelled of flowers ( a pleasant juxtaposition from the rest of the staff, who incessantly reeked of coffee), always wore cowgirl boots, had flowing blonde hair, and no thumbs. But considering kindergarten through twelfth grade for a moment, I could really only remember one: tenth grade.

“Really? Tenth? Why?”

I explained that that was my first day in a new school district. It was also my first day of high school. I didn’t know anyone. What’s more, the bus dropped me off at the doors a full half hour prior to the first bell. While other students convivially hobnobbed, or smoked in the parking lot, or slept on the floor in the library, I merely stopped at my locker, dropped off what I didn’t need right away, then walked to my first class. I turned on the lights, sat at a desk in the back row, and stared off at the bland room for ten minutes, until another student arrived. She didn’t even nod in my direction. Just sat in a seat a decent distance from me, opened a compact, checked her hair, and flipped through a notebook.

“Why were you so early?” Owen wanted to know.

“I don’t know. The bus came early all through tenth and eleventh grade. After a while, I learned to go hang out in the library and I scrambled to finish my homework or I just looked at the books, and there was this other guy I would sit and talk to for a while.”

“Do you remember any other years?”

“Well, I remember the first day of college, but that was a lot more recent. That was in 2000.”

“What!” he blurted. “You’ve been going to college since 2000?”

“Well, no. Remember, first I went to Century College. I went there from 2000 to 2002, then after I got my degree I didn’t go to college again until 2009. So that whole time we lived in Big Lake – back when you were born, I didn’t go. Even once we moved to St. Paul, it was still over a year before I started at Hamline.”

“Still, that’s a long time.”

“I know. But I’m taking it slow.”

Then Owen ran off into the rec center to attend jiu jitsu, and I was left trying to recall my first day of kindergarten. I can remember certain images, certain features, and vague recollection of a class discussion on December ninth of my kindergarten year. I know my teacher’s name and, if you dropped me in the foyer of my elementary school, I could walk assuredly to my former classroom. After all, I was at that school for five years, seeing my kindergarten teacher in the hall and passing by her room long after I’d moved on to higher grades, all the way up to fourth grade.

And then it hit me, I remember my first day of fourth grade, too.

I get on these self-improvement kicks. If, by “improvement” I mean “indulgent.” Right now, I’m on this kick of watching lots of movies.

Every once in a while, I remember that I haven’t seen all of IMDb’s Top 250, or that there are still films on Sight & Sound’s top 50, or in Sackett’s Box Office Hits that I’d like to see. And then this gets me all revved up to satisfy my completest desires. This month, I’ve already viewed 15 films for the first time, and I am rationally confident that I’ll eclipse 20 by 11:59 on the 31st.

I can pinpoint the reason why I got on this particular kick. It’s because I keep all sorts of lists about my life. And the answer to “why now?” is because, every January, I need to update my lists.

Of course, some of the lists don’t need updating just because the new calendar year began. My lists of People I’ve Live With, Cars I’ve Owned, and Times I’ve Been on an Airplane don’t suddenly change just because the calendar did. Actually, the list of People I’ve Lived With hasn’t changed since Emmett was born over two years ago. Sort of. The final column in that lists indicates my duration of cohabitation with said person, but I have that column indexed to the World Clock, so simply opening that file on my computer updates it to the precise number of days I’ve lived with a given person.

Honestly, I derive a singular chunk of happiness from maintaining these lists – the point, even, that I will behave in a manner that allows me to alter a list to my liking. For example, when I first created my list of Professional Baseball Games I Have Attended, I had only been to four MLB games: two in the 1980s, and two in the 1990s. Over the next decade, I added two more games to the list.

It was then that I noticed something: I had attended two MLB games every decade. Each time, it was a Twins’ game, but they played a different team each time. Obviously, then, I knew I had to attend two Twins games in the 2010s, and that I should strive to ensure they play against teams I’ve not seen yet. So now I’ve been to 8 MLB games, two in each decade, with the Twins playing the White Sox, Tigers, Rangers, Orioles, Yankees, Royals, Athletics, and Indians; respectively. The Twins currently hold a 5-3 lead in their “Games with James” series.

And since the Twins are not the only professional baseball team within sane travel distance, I also track my attendance at Saints games. I only attend Saints games in Leap Years, to the point that I even turned down a friend to accompany him at a game in 2015. Sorry, Eric, you were a year early.

But January does mean I have to update my Timeline of My Life, in which each month is given its own row, and I color in cells to indicate life events that transpire over several months (such as employment, or places of residence) and fill in major life events (such as graduating, children, and vacations). It also means I have to update my Ultimate Calendar, in which I briefly note interesting activities in my life, and I bold line in between each year, and assign each year the next in a series of four rotating colors. 2017 is yellow. 2016 was green. It also means I have to update my Word of the Year list. I list one or two words or terms that I became aware of or that grew in importance for me over the past year. Terms I’ve listed in years gone include Flyboat, Doula, Geocaching, Dunnage, and KonMarie.

Ensuring my files were in an acceptable state for 2017 drew my attention to my list of movies and, well, here I am watching films nearly every night. Except tonight, since I am updating this. I know that just sounds like I’m spending my

On the first full day after the bad guy became our nation’s 45th figurehead, Jennifer attended a Women’s March downtown. She says that now’s the time to make a difference in the world, to be kind to people, volunteer, stand up for what’s right, and take action. So, with a knitted hat emblazoned with NASTY, I dropped off my wife and her mother this morning to go out and make a difference.

Meanwhile, I kept three kids fed and calm while attempting to maintain a modicum of sanity. I took Owen to Lego League. The season is over for them, but they had one more meeting to say goodbye for the season. I filmed the boys’ robot run, while trying to keep Isla and Emmett quiet and happy.

Later, I took Isla to a kitchen to make food for homeless people. We arrived with a can of corn, a can of beans, and four onions, which Isla carried in a weird mermaid bag.

The other volunteers could, I think, sense that I wasn’t their altruistically, despite Jennifer’s decree. One of them, recognizing me from last spring, said, “Hey, you didn’t wait until the end of the school year this time, did you?” She was referring to the fact that Isla, as per her school’s policy, is supposed to engage in some sort of community volunteer work during the school year. Being a competent father, I waited until about six weeks before the end of the school year, and took her to this kitchen to help make food.

In the evening, Jennifer declared she was spent and frazzled and not able to do anything else for the next day or so. I prevailed upon her to make popcorn, though. As she was pouring the popcorn from the big mixing bowl into smaller serving bowls, I said, “Just leave some in that big bowl, and I’ll use that one.” I figured that was a way to save on dishes. “Just leave me alone,” she snapped, “I’ve already got all the bowls out. I’ll wash them, anyways.”

Today turned out to be a completely boring day. Despite Jennifer’s reiterated comment that she didn’t want to do anything today, she listed off five things that she needed to do. I offered to do some of them, in exchange for her putting a coat of paint on the trim that’s sitting out in the basement, but she got mad and reminded me she had told me not to ask her to do that. So, it was an unpleasant day.

A lazy day, too. That, of course, does fit in with my goal of being lazier this year, but I find it tough to implement in practice. I farted around the house, taking care of very tiny things – I prided myself in putting away a few papers into the file cabinet, and boldly deciding I no longer needed our tax papers from 2008. Later, I wiped the dust off some picture frames.

For lunch, we all had leftovers. I had the remainder of our potato casserole, and as I was about to scoop it into a plate, Jennifer said, “You can just eat it out of that bowl, to save on dishes.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “good idea.” So I did. Then I washed all the dishes.

Later, Jennifer went to the grocery store. I stayed home all day and that, in an fundamental way, tells me I should view today as a good day, but it wasn’t. I went to bed early, fixing my blankets just right, I curled up and turned over under my heavy blanket, tried to read some Wikipedia on my phone, got bored, went to sleep.